We love Hendrix, but finding good sounding pressings of his most famous albums is practically impossible. At its best, this album can sound very good -- but ONLY if you play the right pressings.

Here's a copy with the kind of big, three-dimensional sound we wish more Hendrix records could have. You hear it as soon as the needle hits the groove.

The guitar -- obviously a key element of any Hendrix recording -- absolutely FLIES out of the speakers here. The bottom end is strong and solid, and the overall sound is big, rich and open. You could play a fairly good-sized stack of copies and probably still not find one with this kind of three-dimensionality and top end extension.

Bridge of Sighs

Note that the guitar sound on the first track of side two appears to have acted as the template for Robin Trower's sound throughout his career. We love Robin Trower -- wish we could find more copies of Bridge of Sighs that sound good -- but his guitar sound was all over this album years before it was on any of his own.

It’s beyond difficult for us to find killer copies of Jimi’s first three or four albums, so I advise you Hendrix fans to give this one a chance. It's the real deal.

Best Practices

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what's right and what's wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.

The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can't find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

The out-of-print War Heroes is one of the few consistent compilations of unreleased Hendrix... Highlights include "Beginning" (which contains a riff almost identical to the Stones' "Bitch"), "Highway Chile," and "Izabella," a track premiered on a Dick Cavett TV show a year before Jimi's untimely death... if you're a serious Jimi fan searching for some interesting obscurities, War Heroes is definitely worth the price.

War Heroes is the sixth studio album (third studio album released posthumously) by American guitarist Jimi Hendrix, released on October 1 and December 1972 in the UK and the US, respectively. It was engineered, mixed and compiled by Eddie Kramer and John Jansen. Though Hendrix produced many of the songs, he was not credited for such.

War Heroes contains the three remaining tracks featured on First Rays of the New Rising Sun which were not included on The Cry of Love or Rainbow Bridge: "Stepping Stone", "Izabella" and "Beginnings" (listed on War Heroes as "Beginning").